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MI5 Laptop Stolen -- Along With Top-Secret Data
Tuscahoma writes "ZDNet has this story about an MI5 agent who lost a laptop containing sensitive information at Paddinton station. Does this sound like the plot of a bad spy movie (turns out that Julia Roberts picked up the laptop to return it, and now she's on the run for her life from enemy spies)?" This really does sound like a screenwriter's dream. I wonder if the machine's already been fenced, the hard drive wiped, and some Londoner is wondering at the "Property of M15. PLEASE return" in the BIOS.
I think this would make a good children's story:
A nice family finds the laptop in Paddington Station and decide to take it home and take care of it. It tends to get into little adventures and hilarity ensues.
One of my former roommates bought such a laptop, only to find out later it was stolen from the CEO of a certain major corporation. He found out after looking at the hard drive, which not only had Windows 95 installed on it, but lots of files relating to executive business of said corporation.
The bizarre part is apparently no one at the computer store ever looked at what, besides Windows 95 itself, was actually installed on the thing, nor did anybody try to format the disk.
I don't think they ever caught the thief.....so some details have been obscured.
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How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
I had a laptop stoling a couple years ago and was just wondering what typically happens to them? Do the thieves sell them as is or do they wipe the HD, install a fresh Win9x (or maybe the latest OpenBSD :)) and then take them to the swap meet? My laptop was a WinNT 4 Server used for demoing web apps, and I doubt the average thug would know what to do when he couldn't just hit ESC to bypass the password prompt. Maybe such systems just wind up in the trash? Are there actually big time laptop-thieving operations or do people just steal them because they can't afford to buy one capable of running Win2K? My apologies for the lack of facts and plethora of questions.
According to the reports over here...
1) The bloke with the Laptop was buying a ticket. This can frequently be a long, tedious complex process - especially at Paddington Station. One of Londons stations which serves some of the rather less -well organised rail companies. And you wouldn't believe how complicated buying a ticket can be in this country at the moment.
2) He put the Laptop down, between his legs.
3) Someone snatched it from behind and ran off. The guy realised at once and gave chase, helped by a couple of Transport Police. But the thief got away.
AJB